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This case considers the entrepreneurial career of Olivia Lum, who founded the Singaporean water company Hyflux in 1989. An orphan born in Malaysia, Lum provides a rare case of an entrepreneurial success in a country whose economic success has primarily rested on state-owned and foreign firms. The case describes the formidable challenges she initially faced, her subsequent breakthrough in China, and the subsequent growth as a global water treatment company employing membrane technology. In 2004 the company entered the large Middle Eastern market for water treatment but soon encountered problems, including political turbulence. The case ends with demonstrations and an emergent crisis in Libya in 2011, a country in which Hyflux had recently invested. The case offers opportunities to explore the nature of entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia, the business importance of relationships between overseas Chinese and mainland China, and the challenges faced by female entrepreneurs. More broadly, it serves as vehicle for teaching students about the global water crisis and the role of business in helping to resolve it.

The case is concerned with Elia Nuqul, the founder of Jordanian-based Nuqul Brothers, a large diversified business group. It shows how Nuqul, a Christian Palestinian whose family was forced to flee to Jordan after the creation of Israel in 1948, built a business in his new home, first in trading and later in consumer products such as hygienic paper manufacturing. The case shows the challenges of building such an entrepreneurial business in a developing region with high political instability. The case is positioned within the wider context of the regional conflict in Palestine and Israel, and it provides a vehicle for exploring the role and responsibility of entrepreneurs, if any, in such conflicts.